


Play the Roman Fool

by toujours_nigel



Series: Charioteer Nazi AU [2]
Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-29
Updated: 2011-12-29
Packaged: 2017-10-28 10:18:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/306842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>follows 'Our Brief Wage', and is part of the Nazis Win-AU, consequently dark.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Play the Roman Fool

**Author's Note:**

> follows 'Our Brief Wage', and is part of the Nazis Win-AU, consequently dark.

“I had meant to tell you,” Ralph said finally, looking up from the newspaper.

Laurie wondered how long he’d been waiting for a response, for that tone to have crept into his voice—Ralph had cut away demonstrations of emotion long ago, adjudged it a waste of effort, Laurie couldn’t remember when he’d last sounded so defensive. Before Claude, perhaps—he couldn’t remember. It mattered so little, after all. “I know,” he said, and, drawing a deeper breath, added, “when did you find out?”

“The last day I was there.’ Ralph had looked down again, to offer him the illusion of privacy.

Three months ago. After Claude. Before Sandy. Before Alec. “You’re certain?” Certainly he would be certain, Ralph always was. He would have taken extra care to be sure. Still, that day had hardly been suitable for drawing firm conclusions, and Laurie did not feel himself capable of shouldering the responsibilities of hope and despair. “Of the name, and the list?”

“Deceased,” Ralph confirmed. “Andrew Raynes.”

Laurie found for a moment that he was glad of Ralph’s averted eyes, and immediately felt a fool. What did it all matter, any longer? “I’m glad,’ he said, and realized he truly was. Andrew never would have survived the camps. “Do you know why?”  Foolish to expect that Ralph would have had the opportunity to find out, or the inclination.

“Throwing Christians to lions, I expect. Or trying, at least. Seems your boy thought it less a sin to commit suicide, in the end.”

Even now—especially now—the word held a special horror, and Laurie, looking up, met the satiric look in Ralph’s eyes. “Andrew was brave.” He had been—his infrequent letters had always been optimistic, long after Ralph started speculating idly about the possibility of Laurie leaving for America. Laurie had not thought it anything out of the ordinary, for six months to lapse between missives. Yet for four months he had been living in the world After Andrew—for ten months now his life has been Before and After acquaintances—Ralph’s first, and then his own. He had made friends, even, in the last three years, men who could approach him at parties without Ralph smoothly appearing at his elbow. After Mark. After Jacob. After Joshua, and that hurts almost as much as living After Andrew—more, perhaps, he had not been numb when Joshua was taken, and Joshua had been painfully young, painfully awkward.

“I should have memorized the names,” Ralph was saying, eyes still on his face, fingers still flying over his work—he didn’t need to look to know what he was doing, and even now his efficiency had a certain stark appeal. Laurie found he wanted very badly to kiss his knuckles, the puckered skin of the damaged hand. “It would be better for you to know.”

It was easy enough to guess why Ralph hadn’t told him so long, of course, and easier yet to bite back the automatic reproof. Perhaps it was simply that he hadn’t the strength for it, anymore—Ralph had drowned his generosity with all other extra-tenuous emotions, and it was tiring to argue with him. Instead he allowed himself a smile—forced one out, wondering how ghastly it must look—and watched it soften the set of Ralph’s jaw. “It doesn’t matter any longer, surely?”

For a long moment he felt Ralph gathering strength to argue it out—Ralph had had no strength at all, After Alec, after he spent hours in the darkness digging a grave single-handed so the dogs wouldn’t get to him, so the collaborators wouldn’t get to him, so Ralph would know where Alec lay mouldering gently beneath the earth, unlike Joshua, unlike Jacob, unlike Sandy. He’d come back in the morning, smears of dirt carefully hidden under his jacket—nothing to see here, nothing to report, nothing for the waiting ears of the collaborators and their masters, and Laurie had been sure he would never be able to nurse him back to health. His eyes were still sunken, and his cheekbones far more prominent than Before, but there wasn’t much to differentiate him from the people on the street—nobody looked healthy, save those living on German payrolls. Even his hair had lost its sheen.

His smile, when he doled it out, still had the seeming sincerity it had had at school—ten years ago, three years, a year ago Laurie would have thought it mostly genuine, but he’d seen it used too frequently and convincingly on Germans since. “I don’t suppose it does,” he said. Some sudden distaste with his work made him get up to wash his hands under the kitchen tap, Laurie listened vaguely to the water running, letting himself look properly for the first time at the revolver Ralph had been cleaning. It was the one from the drawer those many years ago. It felt a symbol of what had changed, that Ralph could so openly display it, that he himself had suggested the idea, After Alec. Ralph had looked, for a moment, rather like Laurie had slapped him—he had not quite dared, afterwards, to bring it up again.

Laurie had woken late—mid-afternoon, almost—after a night waiting for Ralph, walking his bad leg into utter submission. In the kitchen, there had been tea, and thinly sliced toast, and Ralph cleaning his gun out with the meticulous care he must have devoted to preparing his meal. They were living a life After Michael, who had gone missing a day after Alec. Ralph refused to divulge further details, leaving Laurie to fill them in with a vivid, well-informed imagination—whatever it had been, it had induced Ralph to bring the smell of gun-oil into their lives again. He had not been able to make himself ask.

On the scrubbed, bare table, the gun looked incongruous in its little nest of old newspaper. After Joshua, Ralph had begun firmly disengaging them from Sandy’s circle of friends—he had met Alec for drinks, once every few weeks, in the roughest bars they could easily visit; once, he had brought Jacob home and let him sleep on the divan for the night. That had been Before Sandy. Before Andrew, another name to the litany of names. Before Michael, who had been slight, and nervous, and brown-haired and brown-eyed. And Jewish. And homosexual. Laurie found it easy to imagine what had happened to Michael, who had laughed so clearly, a week before, the night he and Alec had disappeared. After Alec, Ralph had come home hard-faced and exhausted, and slept for forty hours straight. After Michael, he had decided to clean his gun.

Ralph turned the tap off and came back around the table, fastidiously drying his hands. He dropped the towel neatly over the gun on his way, and came to rest behind Laurie’s chair, both hands tight on his shoulders. “Hullo, Spuddy.”

Laurie turned his head to kiss the knuckles, the puckered skin and shattered bone of the ruined hand. “Hullo, Ralph.”


End file.
